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Think Jeffery Epstien as a perfect example. He was working with Ghislaine Maxwell they were working for the MotherWEFs spy agencies Mosad & and C_A and likely protected by the FBLie. It was a Blackmail operation. Certainly Politicians but Society influencers and scientists were the main targets. The list of notable people on his flight logs riding on his plane called the Lolita Express is a who’s who of celebrities. Lolita was a main character in a book she was a victim of a pedo file. The scientists were compromised and their research was stolen at the minimum. He had many Professors come to the island , then he would send the young girls to socialize with them . Being videotaped they would determine what girl the researcher was attracted to. The mark would then be offered a research grant , but they would then be asked to take the girl on as an intern. Once installed she would steal the research info and pass it back to Maxwell or Epstien. Of note his plane had traveled to Ukraine at least a couple of Dozen times to human traffice Eastern European women. Epstein was not the only game in town it just happens to be someone that normies like yourself are aware of. There are likely dozens of blackmailers around the country. Once compromised these people do as they are told , period. Example …Washington State just passed a law allowing the state to take and hide Children who have been convinced to be trannies by the Groomers, from their Parents. No one in their right mind would thinQ that is reasonable legislation. Those that passed that garbage are totally controlled.
Once awake you will never go back to sleep.
As a nation and as a humans we all need to support children.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/washing...
they were meant as warnings
(Human Actions, certainly can be)
I think that's the same question.
But I feel the looters are a shield, used by the elites to divide/conquer and to justify things.
The SHEEPLE that align behind them are 99% manipulated/brainwashed or in a Mass Formation.
I TRULY believe you can ONLY Fault the people who COMPREHEND that taking from the productive people, against their will, and redistributing it actually causes great harms... And then they decide it's worth the harm that it does... For some "equality/equity/social bs"... THOSE people are malevolent.
Wanting to help the down-trodden is a part of human nature. Expecting people to stand up, and do it on their own, is ALSO human nature. Dr. Jordan Peterson makes the point. We need BOTH of these groups... Working together, to create the best of society.
But when ONE SIDE becomes all-powerful... Well, NAZI's were socialists, Communists. All murderers.
And Capitalism, despite it's flaws, tends NOT to kill it's customers.
until Governments get involved.
Power without the ability to Stand Up to it... Is the problem Regardless of which side it is on.
To keep things interesting, look at Eddie Willers. Is he good or evil? How do we know? What lie does he tell right on the first page of the novel?
No one ever gets elected by the major parties without being corrupted and controlled.
That's why they apparently despise Trump so much.
(I paraphrased up to what I put into quotation marks).
Why did the concept of Deep State investments in Chinese business ventures just pop into me dino's head?
An interesting study on "who is evil and why" from AR's perspective is to look at her listing of the people on the train that gets buried in the tunnel.
If your incapable of comprehending something, simply destroy it...like capitalism or freedom.
The lack of morality and moral judgement does not excuse evil behaviors, no matter how seemingly minor, to mere stupidity or incompetence. Karma makes no distinction between just a wee bit bad and evil. Karma will always win in the end.
I don't think that I claimed that there was. Of course we do have shades of gray for bad behavior. Murdering someone should and will be dealt with more harshly than driving 10mph over the speed limit (unless you live in Manhattan). I noted in another comment is that evil is defined by doing bad for the fun of it. So, again this is my personal opinion, bad is a subset of evil.
Evil, even under my definition, is just evil. Premeditated murder is evil. Driving too fast because you got distracted is bad, and punishable, but not evil so I'm not comparing levels of evil, merely evil to not evil. Even our American legal system requires mens rea, or criminal intent, to be guilty of a crime (unless you're of the wrong political party). In a nutshell, that's what I'm exploring here.
But putting all that aside (didn't mean to get off on a tangent there), that wasn't even the point of my original question. I'm not trying to build a ranking of most to least evil within the novel. I was not looking at more vs. less evil, I was trying to examine "bad results from intentional misdeeds" which is, as you say evil with no shades of gray, vs. "bad results because the person doesn't know what the heck they're doing." Certain characters, like Cuffy Meigs, Jim Taggart, Floyd Ferris, and Mr. Thompson I believe have malevolent intent from the start. Others like Stadler, I give some benefit of the doubt that he went in to SSI with good intentions, naively thinking that the people he was empowering were as well-meaning and by the time he discovered they weren't, it was too late. Mouch to me is an in-between case. I think he's like many real life politicians who get corrupted by the system and the power. By very early on in the novel, he certainly did let power go to his head, the way he was able to end Phoenix Durango with no compunction. And by the end of the novel, I think there's no question all of it was evil - willing to starve half the country from delayed wheat shipments rather than admit that their plans, whether evil by design or not, had failed. The evil was, at the very least, in not admitting a mistake and not changing course, no matter how they started out.
But bottom line, I was just philosophizing whether the damage caused by the antagonists was more from incompetence at what they're doing, or from pure malevolent intent. I think it varies by character and even then may change through the course of the book.
These lectures took place when I was around 8 years old. I obviously did not watch them until recently. Kids of my age in the final years of the Cold War, we certainly knew Russia/USSR was the enemy, that they had no freedom and a dictatorial government. We knew nothing about Communism or why it was bad, we just believed it because, as tough as it is to believe, there was a society around us, even in the K12 schools, that cautioned how evil it was (though again they never explained why, or any details of what Communism actually was). So if I did see this lecture back then I probably would have completely dismissed it, and that's what society has done. I was thinking about Atlas Shrugged when watching his lecture. I was wondering when it all started. At the opening of the novel they were already deep into the destabilization phase. I wondered, in the Atlas Shrugged universe, when/how did this start? Probably the same way it happened in the real world, after all the novel is set in an unspecified future.
But back to the point of his lecture (and it's pertinence to my original question), I don't believe the looters were the KGB agents, just like the members of the media, most teachers and professors, the "useful idiots", they're not themselves Marxists, they've been caught up in the propaganda game. The stupid teachers you refer to are useful idiots, pawns in a larger game. So are the looters. Some are evil by design, some are well-intentioned but corrupt. Out of corruption, demoralization, inferiority, jealousy, malevolence, take your pick. What I do learn from Yuri's lecture is that it's actually a moot point. They were the useful idiots causing destabilization of a society (either as a direct or side effect) from what we believed to be honest attempts to do good. That's where the rest of us bear responsibility. We didn't listen because this happened so slowly it was like the proverbial frog in boiling water. I had a pretty good education myself. Maybe in the 80s and early 90s when I was in school, there were, looking back at things, very possibly subtle undercurrents of CRT. And yet we learned about US History, we were well-educated in English, literature, math, Chemistry, Physics, Biology. In one of my World Cultures / History class we were taught about what Communism really was. We always pledged to the flag, we took school field trips to Independence Hall, Jockey Hollow & Valley Forge, Washington, D.C. We were given pocket Constitutions on the 200th anniversary of the ratification. While there might have been some CRT bubbling under the surface, it is nowhere even close to the blatant depravity (and as a social liberal I don't use that word lightly) and obvious subversion seen today.
TL;DR My conclusion after watching the Bezmenov lecture today is that whether Rand's looters were intentionally malevolent or not is almost a moot point. Useful idiots are useful idiots.
I found it doubly interesting that of all the things, at the end of Yuri's lecture, the cure/prevention was a belief in a higher power that propaganda could not break.... sounds like a mystic to me :)